ABSTRACT
In the context of a book about the Thames Gateway the airport at Silvertown stands as a living case study for transformative urban regeneration. The costs, consequences, benets, opportunities and opportunisms; the intensities and disorientations of large scale regeneration projects such as the airport, are visible (especially from the air) over and across the Royal Docks sites. Some further consequences of regeneration here are manifest also in neglected interstices, forgotten corners and unvoiced anxieties. In particular the site exemplies some the dynamic congurations of global and local referred to by Graham and Marvin (2001) as ‘glocalisation’; staging conjunctions of generation and ethnicity, wealth and poverty, connectivity and disconnection, against a rapidly changing postindustrial landscape. A kaleidoscopic sense of the splintered spaces of the Royal Docks site can be captured, initially, through a number of indicative statements about the airport.
